Whenever we humans find something unique or special, we either take it and store it somewhere safe or mark it on a map. The prehistoric individuals who did that would be more likely to happen to have just the right thing for surprise challenges. They would then have an advantage over those who didn't care about special things, because by definition they're hard to come by. And those surprise challenges often have asymmetric upside for those who have a solution, because everyone else is desperate for a solution or because they can solve the problem drastically more efficiently than everyone else.
At the same time, mundane things aren't worth collecting because it's easy for anyone to go out and get it, so there exists no advantage for the collector.
Therefore, if individuals who collected rare things ended up with more resources, power, and the resulting reproductive success, it also makes sense that young humans would do the same early on and that collecting rare things regardless of their utility is one of the most important status signals.
Wish me luck.
While a hoard of electronics may not have an instant connection to status like a fancy car, it's probably correlated to other attributes which are rapidly become more more valued.
This is a beautiful story, but I can draft an equally beautiful, completely contradictory[1] story about how prehistoric individuals that wasted time collecting cool but useless rocks were less likely to have just the right thing for surprise challenges, because they directed their efforts towards hoarding useless bling. [2]
Here's my explanation - and bear with me, here.
Some people collect weird things.
That trait sometimes does, and sometimes does not result in an evolutionary or cultural advantage.
Making definitive statements about where this set of weird things falls on the spectrum above is just blindly guessing in the dark.
[1] Which is why beautiful, hand-wavy stories that explain the behaviour of people tens of thousands of years dead are largely useless for understanding that behaviour.
[2] If I were given the choice between asking for help dealing with a surprise challenge, and my options were two people, one of whom I know collects Funko Pops, and the other one does not, knowing nothing else about those individuals, I'm not going to bias my selection towards the former.
Given this, the story that collecting potentially useful materials is an evolved instinct makes a lot more sense than your story. Some of us have it more than others; I find it really hard to resist picking up something that looks like it might be useful and taking it with me. It comes from a place deeper than my conscious appreciation of beauty. Feels like pure instinct.
If your story is true, then you would expect the trait of collecting useless bling to have died out a long time ago, or at least not be as prevalent as it is today.
And by the way, you could extend my story to not just being about collecting lots of physical things, but also seemingly useless information and skills. Rare knowledge and rare abilities aren't a huge leap from rare physical resources.
Sure it does. The explanatory power is that not all human traits have a strong impact on evolutionary fitness, either on the individual level, or on the social level.
Unless conclusively demonstrated otherwise (which a story composed post-facto is not), this is all meaningless noise.
The first thing about knowing something is being clear about the limitations of that knowledge. Just-so stories have no such limitation, which is why they come up so often as unfalsifiable nonsense. They can explain everything and anything, and therefore, explain nothing. All they are is a vehicle for repeating the biases of the storyteller.
finding the pure white and very black ones and arranging them in patterns or matching piles is some what interesting*
*when I'm forced to go to a beach and told to enjoy myself for hours on end whilst looking after the kids
https://rust.esportinfo.gg/skins/tools/rock
Humans haven't changed all that much since the Neolithic...
- the author literally goes to lengths to explain that they believe they had multiple purposes at different places/times. It's like you didn't actually read the article...
https://www.thoughtco.com/stone-boiling-ancient-cooking-meth...
It seems that these orbs are "complicated". A cooking stone as you describe is unlikely to be decorated. Do you inscribe your kettle! I have never heard of a quern being decorated either.
Grain millers had fierce debates about what patterns worked best on what stones and for which grains. some grooves are of great functional benefit, but then beyond that ...
Full circle?
"What were they used for?" is asked like there's only one answer. They were probably used for anything else a rock is useful for, but being nicely sized for a hand, pretty, etc made them easier to use, more effective, or just flashier.
AFAIK the class of objects referred to here don't share a lot of qualities that would make them a class in other contexts; there's no single shape, some have wear that may indicate original uses, etc etc. It just appears to be some of the early personal artifacts that people valued that are durable enough to see today.